The Balance of Our Budget: Funding Public Safety Without Funding Waste
- nicholasjbroughan
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
The Caroline County Board of Supervisors has already voted and passed a 6 cent real estate tax hike on local families. The rest of the county budget remains technically proposed until the final vote this Tuesday night.
Let’s be entirely clear from the start: a portion of this tax increase is dedicated to a necessary update for our Public Safety Personnel Plan. Supporting our deputies, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel is a top priority for our community, and those frontline investments are absolutely vital.
But public safety shouldn't be used as a shield to hide government waste. When you look past the headlines and audit the raw financial files, a troubling pattern emerges. The administration is asking you to pay higher taxes not just for first responders, but to cover a growing footprint of administrative bloat.
How We Got Here
When I requested the county's full budget documents, the administration sent over a massive data dump of unformatted spreadsheets and text files. I did the legwork to sort through the clutter, and here is what the official records actually show: (edited for clarification)
The total school operating budget from all funding sources climbed to $45,485,306.
Out of that total, the direct local county cash appropriation from our property taxes was $17,669,045 for operations, with an additional $900,510 dedicated to school buses and leases.
During this exact same period, the school system's Average Daily Membership (ADM)—the official metric used by the state to calculate funding—remained completely flat at 4,296.
Internal payroll files show ongoing adjustments to benefit formulas and administrative lines directed straight from the top of county management.
While our emergency responders are getting necessary adjustments, a significant portion of your tax dollars is still being swallowed up by an expanding, top heavy bureaucracy. We are being asked to fund administrative growth under the guise of funding public safety.
My Plan to Fix It
We can fully protect and fund our first responders without forcing local households to pay for government waste. As your supervisor, I will bring a data backed, calculated approach to county finances:
Audit the entire ledger line by line to isolate and eliminate non electronic or non essential administrative spending.
Freeze upper tier administrative salary hikes to keep management overhead flat.
Prioritize frontline services so that your tax dollars directly support public safety and classroom education, rather than bureaucratic insulation.
See the Receipts for Yourself
Absolute transparency is the only way to restore trust in local government. I believe the community should have full access to the exact same information the administration has before the final budget vote on Tuesday night.
Click the link below to download the complete, raw data packet. Look at the spreadsheets, current salaries, check the numbers, and see the exact balance for yourself.
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